CHAUCER. 183 



ment or defect, and that universal desire of the human mind to 

 have everything accounted for which makes the moon respon 

 sible for the whimsies of the weathercock is cheaply gratified. 

 But as mankind in the aggregate is always wiser than any single 

 man, because its experience is derived from a larger range of 

 observation and experience, and because the springs that feed it 

 drain a wider region both of time and space, there is commonly 

 some greater or smaller share of truth in all popular prejudices. 

 The meteorologists are beginning to agree with the old women 

 that the moon is an accessory before the fact in our atmospheric 

 fluctuations. Now, although to admit this notion of inherited 

 good or ill to its fullest extent would be to abolish personal 

 character, and with it all responsibility, to abdicate freewill, and 

 to make every effort at self-direction futile, there is no inconsid 

 erable alloy of truth in it, nevertheless. No man can look into 

 the title-deeds of what may be called his personal estate, his 

 faculties, his predilections, his failings whatever, in short, sets 

 him apart as a capital I without something like a shock of 

 dread to find how much of him is held in mortmain by those 

 who, though long ago mouldered away to dust, are yet fatally 

 alive and active in him for good or ill. What is true of indi 

 vidual men is true also of races, and the prevailing belief in a 

 nation as to the origin of certain of its characteristics has 

 something of the same basis in facts of observation as the 

 village estimate of the traits of particular families. Interdum 

 vulgus rectum videt. 



We are apt, it is true, to talk rather loosely about our Anglo- 

 Saxon ancestors, and to attribute to them in a vague way all the 

 pith of our institutions and the motive power of our progress. 

 For my own part, I think there is such a thing as being too 

 Anglo-Saxon, and the warp and woof of the English national 

 character, though undoubtedly two elements mainly predomi 

 nate in it, is quite too complex for us to pick out a strand here 

 and there, and affirm that the body of the fabric is of this or 

 that. Our present concern with the Saxons is chiefly a literary 

 one ; but it leads to a study of general characteristics. What, 

 then, so far as we can make it out, seems to be their leading 

 mental feature? Plainly, understanding, common-sense a 

 faculty which never carries its possessor very high in creative 

 literature, though it may make him great as an acting and even 

 thinking man. Take Dr. Johnson as an instance. The Saxon, 

 as it appears to me, has never shown any capacity for art, nay, 

 commonly commits ugly blunders when he is tempted in that 



